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2026

  • in Grants
  • 2 min read

Small grants, big impact

A group of hackers got together and decided to create a fund. The idea was simple: sometimes a small amount of money is what stands between a good research question and someone actually doing the work.

PDXHF makes small grants, usually around $1,000, to help remove those barriers. The amount is not set in stone. What matters is what the funding makes possible and how the work benefits the community.

  • in Grants
  • 2 min read

How to get your grant approved

A lot of grant applications fail for reasons that are avoidable.

Usually it is not because the idea is bad. It is because the reviewers cannot quickly tell what is being proposed, why it matters to the Portland hacker community, or whether the applicant can actually deliver it.

This post is specifically about how to make a strong case for a PDXHF grant.

Thanks for coming to our FOIA party!

Thanks for coming to our FOIA Party!

Thanks to everyone who participated in our very first FOIA Party! We were excited to see so many folks come out and learn how to get their hands dirty with public records requests. Kate Kaye gave folks an evening full of tips and tricks on how to make meaningful public records requests, and gave us a look into how investigative journalists use these tools to get important information for the public interest.

We learned how to make well-tailored requests, be sensitive to the realities of the humans who fulfill records requests, and make sure that these facts work to our advantage where possible rather than to our detriment. Kate also gave us a sense of some of the information that she herself has uncovered through document requests in topics relating to mass surveillance, right here in Portland.

If you weren't able to join us, sorry to hear it! We hope to continue these kinds of workshops, both in the context of public records and other items of public interest in the future. In the meantime, here are a few tips and tricks you can keep in mind!

  1. DO THE THING! You (yes, YOU) are allowed to ask your municipal, county, state and federal government for ANY RECORDS YOU WANT! The asking is not a crime, and while you may not get everything you want, you will get nothing if you do not ask.
  2. Find the right place to ask! Government agencies typically have designated public records officers whose job it is to receive requests from the public. Feel free to check out their website, or call them up and ask!
  3. Do your homework! Records officers are not going to find anything if you do not ask for the right phrases. Take some time to go through the information that is publicly available, or discovered from prior requests, to find key words and phrases that the office you're sending requests to tends to use. For instance, asking about "drones" might not turn up results, but "unmanned aerial vehicles" may do better.
  4. Consider asking for a public interest fee waiver. Do you have an idea for a great story of public interest that might fit on the PDX Hacker Foundation blog? Tell us about it! This could be a great way to help your community, and also potentially qualify for a waiver of the relevant document production fees.

Thanks to everyone who has shown enthusiasm to engage in public transparency and research in this manner. Catch you next time.

--jonas